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I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

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Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#91

Post by jowday »

nbardy wrote: post #78
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the k…

I don’t think image+text pair models (E.G. CLIP) would be very useful for AV tasks. They’re not very good at fine-grained classification or counting the number of instances in a scene. Not even getting into latency or model size.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#92

Post by toomuchtodo »

jdlshore wrote: post #88
toomuchtodo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM, who owns Cruise, paid out claims for 124 deaths due to their ignition recall that they were aware of, did not disclose to regulators at the time, and had to forfeit $900 million to the United States government in 2014 [1]. Tesla's Autopilot has been attributed to 12 deaths [2]. Let they who is without engineering sin cast the first stone. Intent and risk appetite is a spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…

Classic whataboutism. GM's irresponsible behavior doesn't excuse Tesla's irresponsible behavior.

I don’t believe Autopilot, a robust driver assist system with substantial safeguards, is irresponsible (as someone who has used it for ~60k miles of travel). I do believe allowing people to die because you don’t want to replace a defective ignition switch is. That’s not whataboutism, it’s pointing out hypocrisy. NHTSA believes Autopilot is safe enough to continue to allow its use on public roads. What makes a random HN participant a superior authority on the topic than them? Is it materially unsafe because someone here asserts so without backing up their claim? These are not rhetorical questions. 3700 people die per day from auto accidents that are ~95% human error caused and 12 deaths total while Autopilot was active is irresponsible?

Death is unavoidable, only preventable short term on a scale. To expect zero deaths is unreasonable.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#93

Post by reTensor »

technofiend wrote: post #73
reTensor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kyle Vogt was removed from the CEO position in late 2018 after Cruise failed to make progress toward a number of milestones. The milestones were outlined as part of the Cruise acquisition. Dan Ammann took over and made really substantial progress. Ammann is widely considered to be the reason Cruise is where it is today. His record of success was in sharp contrast to Vogt's consistent record of failure. Unfortunately,…

At least according to Tech Crunch it was because Ammann also failed to deliver something on Barra's agenda [1]: And while Ammann continued to push the company to expand, there were missed targets, notably the plan to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019. The company has spent the past two years inching toward that commercialization goal, along with the rest of the industry, which has gone through a spate of…

The failure to launch in 2019 was shortly after Ammann took over (late 2018).

Ammann inherited Vogt's mess, and at that time nobody in management fully understood how bad the situation was. Ammann promptly began fixing things and we see the fruits of that today.

Ammann's departure, to the best of our knowledge, is a result of a conflict with GM's CEO regarding the future of Cruise as a business.

Hopefully Vogt can preserve, and successfully build on, what Ammann accomplished.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#94

Post by jowday »

sanguy wrote: post #81

Cruise has been a disaster inside GM for awhile now with a lack of progress to bring Super-Cruise to all models all across the US. They have had several tenders for the data required to build out the Super-Cruise maps but these have all been a disaster as clear the critical knowledge is gone.

Confusingly enough, Cruise has nothing to do with Super-Cruise. Super-Cruise is handled by an in-house team at GM.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#95

Post by joenathanone »

bluGill wrote: post #32
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I…

LiDAR can't see through fog either, Radar and Ultrasonics can but from my understanding those are only used as secondary sensors.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#96

Post by andrewia »

sanguy wrote: post #81

Cruise has been a disaster inside GM for awhile now with a lack of progress to bring Super-Cruise to all models all across the US. They have had several tenders for the data required to build out the Super-Cruise maps but these have all been a disaster as clear the critical knowledge is gone.

From what I know, GM Super Cruise is unrelated to Cruise LLC. GM has been developing Super Cruise on their own since 2013, and the system relies on a forward-facing camera and 3 radars (front and blind spots) to navigate the road. It links the camera's lane recognition data to 3D road maps stored onboard to anticipate the road ahead. It's also restricted to limited-access roads where pedestrians aren't a concern.

Cruise AVs are much different. They appear to use LIDAR, radar, and camera data to understand their surroundings including intersections, pedestrians, and road hazards.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#97

Post by madamelic »

kelnos wrote: post #80
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. The cars with all the crazy sensing equipment on them are ugly as sin. That really doesn't jive with Tesla's brand at all. A more charitable interpretation may be aerodynamics; making those worse would reduce the car's range. Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form cannot always come before function.

> I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics.

I've always read it as Tesla trying to do a paradigm leap. It seems everyone in self-driving knows you can do it pretty well with a huge variety of sensors, but what if you got extremely good at only camera-based then added in the new sensors.

Basically, if you can establish that the very worst case works, you can add in more sensors to go beyond that and have the cars become superhuman rather than having to depend on all sensors to consistently be working to have a safe vehicle.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#98

Post by rhacker »

nbardy wrote: post #78
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the k…

8+ responding distance dots that are much closer than they should be are already a STOP, APPLY BREAKS situation where not much ML is even needed. That's the beauty of LIDAR. It will save lives unlike Tesla's driving into obvious poles/truck booms mistaken for a statue of liberty in Nebraska.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#99

Post by kelnos »

jowday wrote: post #25
ajross wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [integrating] Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars [is] not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any such integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge portion of the stack. That sounds like a [citation needed] to me. Surely there are UI problems to be solved in a car with a human being in the driver's seat, but the sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's…

I work in the AV space, so I guess you’ll just have to trust me. I assume Cruise internals look very similar to the internals at other AV companies, which I think is a safe assumption. >The sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are. Sensors will be very different. LIDAR prices are coming down but we’re still a while off from incorporating it into consumer vehi…

> Automotive decision making will also be extremely different. Modern robotaxis rely on very high detail HD maps that are continuously updated. It’s impossible to scale that nationwide in a way that would work in a consumer car.

What are the challenges here? Is it simply the different scale required on the backend to handle tens (hundreds?) of millions of privately-owned cars, vs. that required for orders of magnitude fewer robotaxis? If so, I don't think that's all that insurmountable. I guess one thing that would worry me there would be bandwidth on that scale, as well as what happens when a privately-owned car is taken into an area where it doesn't have connectivity. I assume a robotaxi would just refuse to go where it can't talk to the internet, while that would be unacceptable for a private car to do. (Then again, the private car could still have manual drive controls, and require a driver to take over when internet connectivity is lost.)

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#100

Post by markstos »

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

Cars are already complex enough to make them vulnerable to global supply chain challenges. The more tech that's required to put a car on the road, the more challenged that manufacturer is going to be have enough inventory of all the components to actually ship cars.

I agree that LIDAR is valuable and hope all these companies are all able make safe cars with their tech stacks.

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